Gloria and Treeless Street | Page 6

the hall, and that she had eyes like mine!
"Uncle Em has a protracted case here, so we may be here quite a while longer, but when I get home will you let me go district-visiting sometime with you? And introduce me to the girl with eyes like mine, and whose name is Rose--my middle name. It makes me feel queer every time I think of her--I don't know exactly how to describe it, but it seems a little as if there were two Rose Abercrombies. Suppose I lived down on that Un-Pleasant street--across the hall!
"Lovingly yours,
"GLORIA ROSE ABERCROMBIE."
To Gloria's surprise, she received an answer to her letter, with a considerable degree of promptness, but it was not postmarked Tilford.
"_My dear Miss Gloria Rose_: Perhaps you didn't know District Nurses could be prompt in answering letters! But, you see, I am having my two weeks' vacation up here in this little hilly place. I get two weeks off every summer--and actually sit down! I'm doing it now--if my writing joggles now and then it is because I am rocking. I want to make the most of my opportunities. This is the quietest place to sit and rock I was ever in.
"Your letter was such a delightful surprise. Of course, I'll take you with me. I'll do more than introduce you to my assistant Rose. No, I'll not describe her to you. I will wait and let you see her for yourself. Well, Dinney's mother is very sick. I could not bear to leave her. What do you think she said to me the last thing? 'I'll wait'--just those two words--when waiting will be so cruelly hard. I would not have come now, but the doctor put his foot down. I suppose I was worn out.
"My dear, if I loved anyone very much I should say to her: 'Never be a District Nurse!' It's so terribly hard on the heart-strings.
"There is another Dinney on Pleasant Street, but his name is Straps. I don't know why, unless because of his one suspender, and then it ought to be Strap. He looks like Dinney, but his 'baby' he leads by the elbow instead of drags in a cart. The baby of Straps is very old and blind, the shoestrings he sells on the corner are very poor ones, but when you need shoestrings I wish you would buy those. Din--I mean Straps--leads him back and forth and loves him. There doesn't seem any reason in all the world why he should--or could--but he does.
"There, I must stop.
"Lovingly,
"MARY S. WINSHIP,
"District Nurse."
The letter of the District Nurse reawakened all Gloria's interest in the street she had "discovered." She thought about it a great deal while she and Aunt Em were driven about sightseeing. Her preoccupation was a source of gentle worriment to Aunt Em, and would have been even more so had that dear person suspected Gloria's designs against Un-Pleasant Street. These designs were unbosomed in a second letter to the District Nurse.

CHAPTER IV.
Gloria's second letter to the District Nurse ran thus:
"_Dear Miss Winship_: I keep thinking of those dreadful houses. Every time I look in a daily paper I expect to read that one of them has tumbled down, and I'm afraid it will be Dinney's house, where that poor, sick woman is--or Straps' house! They ought to tumble down, every one of them, but not till they are emptied of their poor loads of humanity. If they are half as bad inside as they are outside! I keep and keep thinking of them. Think of a girl named Rose being in a house like that, and another girl with Rose for her middle name in a beautiful, great hotel here, or Uncle Em's lovely house at home--both of them Roses. It isn't fair!
"Do you know, I have a plan, but I'm 'most afraid to divulge it--I wouldn't to Uncle Em for the world, yet! He'd laugh the roof off. He says women have no heads for business, and as for girls!--But if not heads, I suppose they might have hearts, and the hearts might ache, the way mine does every time I think of those houses and Straps and Dinney and Hunkie--and the girl with eyes like mine. Yes, I'll tell you. I mean to tear down some of those houses--Dinney's, at any rate. Now, go outdoors and laugh!
"I don't suppose you know it, but Uncle Em's keeping a lot of money for me when I get of age. I'm seventeen now. I never asked how much money I'll have, but it's a lot, I'm sure of that. What I've been planning out in my mind is to use some of that money in building decent houses for Dinney and Straps, and some of the rest you are working for. I can have the